How the Winnipeg Jets built the best regular-season team in the NHL

New York Times

14-04-2025

WINNIPEG — The Winnipeg Jets weren't supposed to be nearly this good.
The Jets were embarrassed by their five-game playoff performance against the Colorado Avalanche last spring but began 2024-25 with virtually the same roster. They tried to sign Sean Monahan but couldn't, Tyler Toffoli was never interested, and they kept Dylan DeMelo but let Brenden Dillon go. Then, after promising no stone would go unturned in their coaching search, they promoted Scott Arniel from within. Some outlets wondered: Would Winnipeg even make the playoffs?
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The Jets have now clinched the 2025 Presidents' Trophy, cementing their status as the best regular-season team in the NHL.
Three-quarters of our pundits picked the Jets to make the playoffs in The Athletic's preseason poll, giving them the seventh-best playoff odds in the West. Jets fans are fond of pointing me to a Sportsnet panel wherein Winnipeg was picked to miss the playoffs altogether while Edmonton was picked to win the Stanley Cup. My preseason prognostication was that Winnipeg was a playoff team but last year's 110 points were likely out of reach. The power play would get better, I reasoned, but Arniel would be in tough to inspire last year's quality at five-on-five. And how could Connor Hellebuyck get any better than the best in the world after winning the 2024 Vezina Trophy?
Let the Jets fanatics and die-hards have their laugh, then. It won't be their first — and the way Winnipeg gets undersold, it won't be their last. The Jets' Presidents' Trophy win, even in a 4-1 loss to Edmonton, neatly bookends a season that began with a 6-0 win against the Oilers on Oct. 9. Whatever happens against Anaheim on Wednesday's 'fan appreciation night' will be about joy — a victory lap to celebrate the fans, with one eye on good health and the playoffs ahead — and not about Winnipeg's place in the standings.
The Jets are No. 1 in their division, their conference and their league. They've made history, winning the city's first division title while winning the first-ever conference and league banners in either city or franchise history.
But how did Winnipeg go from being embarrassed by Colorado to the class of the NHL?
This is a story that starts long before the pond hockey Winnipeg and Edmonton played on Sunday night.
'We have levels that we need to find this offseason. I hope it stings for all of us into the summer and we use it as motivation.'
That was Josh Morrissey, speaking shortly after the Game 5 loss to Colorado. It was the first in a series of self-aware statements by Jets leadership. Winnipeg had put together a quality regular season for the second straight year but, despite its progress, had been pushed out of the first round just as easily. In the days that followed, Morrissey's teammates would add to his urgency.
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'Every one of us has to take a look in the mirror. We have to have better. It's unacceptable,' Kyle Connor said.
'What am I doing to get better at the game? What am I doing to try to get 10 percent better this summer?' is how Mark Scheifele put it.
To be present in the room as those words were spoken, especially from a Morrissey still drenched in playoff sweat, was to understand that they were more than platitudes. I've covered this team since 2017-18. Every group of Jets has made some form of exit interview statement about getting better next season. In a league where 31 of 32 teams fall short of their goal every year, it doesn't take long to get used to platitudes.
We understood Winnipeg's progress in real time. On the night of Winnipeg's Game 5 loss, I wrote: 'Colorado's five-game dismantling does not undo Winnipeg's progress. It reveals how much further the Jets still need to go.'
And following the Jets' exit interviews: 'If you ask me, it's about time Winnipeg's leadership group talked like this … Despite everything the Jets accomplished during a glittering regular season, the level they're at and the one they need to get to are worlds away. As an organization, the Jets have shied away from 'I'm the problem. It's me.' As someone who believes he can decipher between platitudes and earnest calls to action, Morrissey's words were a refreshing approach to a devastating moment.'
Morrissey has now completed his third straight 60-point season while continuing to grow as an all-around player. Connor went from surprising us with board-rattling play against Colorado to being the standard-bearer for '5 to 10 percent better,' setting a new career high in points while dramatically outperforming his past self defensively and winning his minutes by 21 goals. Dylan Samberg caused great fright when he left Sunday's game after blocking a Connor McDavid one-timer, and the scale of fans' fear was directly proportionate to the growth of his game. Hellebuyck hasn't regressed from 'best in the world' — he's improved. He leads all goaltenders in wins, shutouts, save percentage, goals-against average and goals saved above expected.
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These are some of the individual hallmarks that result from a summer spent soul-searching and a season spent practicing improved habits. The team has shown more consistency and a higher level of overall play — even when compared to its eight-game win streak at the end of last season. What we seem to have underestimated is not the truth in Winnipeg's call to action but the size of the Jets' response to it.
Rick Bowness said last year we would recognize Winnipeg's growth by the scale of its effort when games were on the line. He said it would start in the regular season — that we would know it by the Jets' second and third efforts in close games against all opponents.
'But when it counts the most, in the playoffs, and the other team has cranked up the speed, the pace, the intensity, you have to be able to respond,' he concluded. 'And I think that sounds to me like the players understand that now.'
The Jets have won more games than anyone else in the NHL this season. They've given up the fewest goals. And, perhaps closer to Bowness' ideal, the Jets have the second-best winning percentage in one-goal games this season — while also leading the league in games won by three goals or more.
'Right from the very beginning, we have bought into the way we have to play,' Dylan DeMelo said on Sunday. 'Maturity of the group, just growing together and understanding that we can get success by playing good defence. While maybe in the past we were trading chances and being a little more run-and-gun and realizing when it mattered the most it wasn't working for us, we've got a good handle on it now and we're comfortable in situations, tight games. We're not beating ourselves often. It's just been a totality of all those things and we're still building.'
The Presidents' Trophy is also a testament to the sheer quality of players assembled on the Winnipeg roster.
For that, you can point to the Jets' courage of their convictions in naming Mark Scheifele their first-ever draft pick of the 2.0 era. You can reflect on Tavis MacMillan's scouting efforts in hiding all Jets logos, booking a seldom-used hotel and sneaking in the side door at the arena to get another look at a Tier II goaltender named Connor Hellebuyck leading up to the 2012 draft. There's the selection of Adam Lowry two rounds after Scheifele in 2011 — a captain whose leadership impact has been everything the Jets hoped for when he inherited the 'C' from Blake Wheeler.
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Count Morrissey and Nikolaj Ehlers among the other scouting wins. Count Samberg, taken in the second round in 2017, and Cole Perfetti, whose breakthrough this season gives Winnipeg a 2020 first-round win. Count backup goaltender Eric Comrie ('I always come back,' he likes to joke) and Mason Appleton among the late-round wins and add college-free-agent-signee-turned-comeback-story Brandon Tanev, reacquired at the deadline.
If you ask me, though, the Jets' roster construction has made an important breakthrough via a Kevin Cheveldayoff hot streak running from 2022 through this season.
Back then, the Jets desperately needed more 200-foot players who could compete in all areas of the ice. They were heading toward a devastating playoffs miss when Cheveldayoff traded pending UFA Andrew Copp — a good 200-foot player in his own right — for Morgan Barron and the draft picks that became Elias Salomonsson, Brad Lambert and Thomas Milic. In 2023, Cheveldayoff dramatically upgraded his team's tenacity by acquiring Nino Niederreiter and Vladislav Namestnikov before getting Gabriel Vilardi, Alex Iafallo and Rasmus Kupari for Pierre-Luc Dubois.
Now all four Jets lines have at least one pain in the pants to play against, be it Iafallo in Vilardi's spot up top, Niederreiter, Namestnikov, Barron or Tanev.
The Jets tried hard to acquire Brock Nelson at this year's trade deadline. They don't get everything they want. But an enormous amount of Winnipeg's accomplishment can be traced to Cheveldayoff's roster reconstruction over the past three seasons. This is not a team of superstars, despite Scheifele, Connor and Morrissey's quality. Winnipeg beats teams due to the depth and breadth of the sum of its parts.
What comes next?
Winnipeg doesn't get to take a victory lap and Arniel knows it.
'We're still going to be judged on what happens from Game 83 on,' he said following Sunday's game. 'Hopefully there's a long story to go with that and it gets to be a 2 1/2-month-long story.'
No team has won more regular-season games than the Jets' 153 over the last three seasons. Fifteen teams have won more than the Jets' two playoff victories in that same time frame. You could hear the sense of 'we haven't accomplished anything yet' from DeMelo, Niederreiter and Arniel after the game.
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The Jets will open the playoffs against the second wild-card team in the West. That team will probably be St. Louis, but this isn't guaranteed. Winnipeg could play Minnesota, for example, if the Blues beat Utah on Tuesday and the Wild lose to Anaheim in regulation. There's even a chance the Jets play Calgary; the Flames could theoretically pass St. Louis, Minnesota or both if they beat Vegas on Tuesday and Los Angeles on Thursday.
We won't know the Jets' opponent until Tuesday or Thursday if the Flames make it interesting. We do know it's better to enter the playoffs as the NHL's top team than any other seed.
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— Derek (@Dt33345) April 14, 2025
There's one more bit of good news: Samberg is meant to be all right following Sunday's game. Arniel said they'd look at him again on Monday to make sure but that Samberg appeared to be OK.
It's not all roses on the injury front, though. Vilardi is meant to start skating 'soon,' putting his Game 1 readiness in doubt, while Ehlers' 'freak accident' aggravation of his injury on Saturday may have long-term consequences. Kupari has yet to clear concussion protocol.
The Jets are built well enough, playing well enough and positioned well enough to buy time for their injured players. They're the league's top regular-season team — a feat no one predicted.
Now it's time for them to push forward, because this team was never going to be judged by its regular season.
Arniel seems to fully appreciate that fact. On Sunday, he interrupted the Presidents' Trophy discourse and pointed to the postseason in his closing remarks.
'It almost sounds like I'm having the speech at the end of the year,' he said. 'I'm not done yet, so I hope to talk a lot more. Hopefully, this lasts a lot longer. We've done some great things — I still think we can do a lot more.'